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A rapidly changing and digital world creates a desperate need for more agile, data-driven decision-making. Every business needs to move faster with data. But, if I were to ask you the question, “how agile is your business,” how would you answer? How would you even go about measuring your ability to make faster data-driven decisions?

One way is by assessing the complexity of your analytical ecosystem. This includes all the databases, on-premises and in the cloud, applications and analytic processes that you currently have in place across the enterprise to deliver insights to your business users. Typically complex and siloed analytical ecosystems are less agile. So, assessing complexity can often be used as a surrogate to assess your agility.

What we’ve found, when we do this analysis with our customers, is that innovation and adoption of new technologies has created a wild west environment of siloed platforms, data and analytics. The data is stuck everywhere, in multiple public clouds, on private clouds and different data centers and within lines of business. Most of these systems don’t talk to each-other. Analytic insights are truncated by the unavailability of data. And, stitching it all together can take months, if not years. This is completely unacceptable, when the world (and competitors) are moving by at breakneck speeds.

The data is stuck everywhere, in multiple public clouds, on private clouds and different data centers and within lines of business. Most of these systems don’t talk to each-other.

This is a problem we hear often and it is the one we are solving today with what we call Teradata Borderless Analytics. Borderless Analytics turns hybrid systems into a single analytical ecosystem — it allows seamless shifting of analytic workloads across a multi-system hybrid environment. It provides our customers the ability to easily manage multi-system environments and shift workloads to optimize resource utilization. At the same time, it enables cross-technology analytics; giving users access to heterogeneous analytic processing engines and data stores.

Using the latest Teradata technology like QueryGrid and Unity, and open source tools like Presto, we are enabling a true multi-system, multi-location analytical environment that can integrate data between different instances of the public cloud, managed and private clouds and on-premises. As our press release states, this is all about flexibility and agility and “…empowering companies to analyze data where they want, when they want, and across the data and platforms they need regardless of where they reside.”

Complexity kills agility. One of our core missions is to take the complexity out of our customers’ analytical ecosystems. We stitch it all together, and offer templates and predefined, advanced analytics capabilities to stand up a hybrid analytical ecosystem in minutes (rather than months, or years). And, grow and expand that analytical ecosystem as needed with assured knowledge that scaling the Teradata hybrid environment will not hurt agility. QueryGrid, Unity, open source Presto and Aster analytics in the cloud all comes together to power Borderless Analytics.

Borderless Analytics allows our customers to use advanced analytical capabilities very quickly across all their data, without needing the expertise and time to move data around. All analytics is done within our ecosystem. The release of Teradata QueryGrid 2.0, combined with Presto, lets us span analytics across different sources of data. With Teradata Unity our customers are able to run multiple instances in sync for extreme high availability in the cloud, or across various clouds. This is yet another step in our vision of a Sentient Enterprise, that functions as a single analytic organism and reacts to changes in the world as it happens.

We believe that a less complex enterprise, in terms of systems and processes, is easier to change, and is therefore more agile. When you’re asked, “how agile is your business,” start by assessing complexity. The complexity of your processes, and the complexity of your analytical ecosystem. Or, talk to Teradata. We can help you remove complexity to power more advanced and agile data-driven decision-making.

Oliver Ratzesberger is President and Chief Executive Officer of Teradata Corporation and a member of the company’s board of directors. Mr. Ratzesberger has a proven track record in executive management, as well as 20+ years of experience in analytics, large data processing and software engineering.

Oliver’s journey started with Teradata as a customer, driving innovation on its scalable technology base. His vision of how the technology could be applied to solve complex business problems led to him joining the company. At Teradata, he has been the architect of the strategy and roadmap, aimed at transformation. Under Oliver’s leadership, the company has challenged itself to become a cloud enabled, subscription business with a new flagship product. Teradata’s integrated analytical platform is the fastest growing product in its history, achieving record adoption.

During Oliver’s tenure at Teradata he has held the roles of Chief Operating Officer and Chief Product Officer, overseeing various business units, including go-to-market, product, services and marketing. Prior to Teradata, Oliver worked for both Fortune 500 and early-stage companies, holding positions of increasing responsibility in technology and software development, including leading the expansion of analytics during the early days of eBay.

A pragmatic visionary, Oliver frequently speaks and writes about leveraging data and analytics to improve business outcomes. His book with co-author Professor Mohanbir Sawhney, “The Sentient Enterprise: The Evolution of Decision Making,” was published in 2017 and was named to the Wall Street Journal Best Seller List. Oliver’s vision of the Sentient Enterprise is recognized by customers, analysts and partners as a leading model for bringing agility and analytic power to enterprises operating in a digital world.

Oliver is a graduate of Harvard Business School’s Advanced Management Program and earned his engineering degree in Electronics and Telecommunications from HTL Steyr in Austria.